


Christmas in New Mexico

by kpopcircusbaby



Category: Nancy Drew (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-12
Updated: 2018-08-12
Packaged: 2019-06-26 02:03:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15653508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kpopcircusbaby/pseuds/kpopcircusbaby
Summary: After getting disappointed in Iceland, Sonny heads to New Mexico to follow some leads on a new artifact, but he wishes he had help.





	Christmas in New Mexico

**Author's Note:**

> Just a heads up that this references the Sonny comic from SEA a lot, so if you haven't read it here's the link: http://sonnyjoonmasterpost.tumblr.com/post/124093957421/transdaryldixon-promised-to-rohtua-the (And ofc this fic also references the ending of MED, so don't read it if you haven't seen that yet!)

It was 1:26 am on a cold December night, and Sonny Joon was about to get lost in the New Mexico desert. Or at least, he certainly hoped not.

He was sitting in a parking lot in a slightly beaten up 1995 Ford pickup truck that he’d bought for a few hundred bucks off of Craigslist several weeks ago. It was reliable and ugly, which were two adjectives he didn’t really spend a lot of time with, but after supergluing a few bobbleheads to the dashboard and putting an “I Brake For UFOs” bumper sticker on the back, it was starting to feel a lot more like his. There was still that weird smell that came out when he turned on the air conditioning, but Sonny honestly didn’t mind that part – it made everything about this feel more _real._

He smoothed a map of the area around Roswell across the steering wheel, and kept looking back and forth between the map and several charts and documents lying on the passenger seat. The compass they’d found in New Zealand was sitting on the dashboard, the lights it projected twinkling on the ceiling of the car. He’d been working on figuring out some new clues for weeks now, and after double checking his work for the past hour it all seemed to point to a part of the desert next to a highway, about an hour’s drive west of where he was now. He put the compass in his pocket and started the truck.

Just as he was driving out of the parking lot, his phone rang. Jamila’s name flashed on the screen. He answered it with one hand and held the steering wheel with the other. Luckily, there weren’t any other cars on the road this late at night, so he had to worry more about following the directions on the map than not hitting anything.

“Sonny, where on earth are you? I just left your grandfather’s Christmas party and it was a rather boring affair without you. You’ve got a lot of presents to open, by the way. And thank you for the book you got me, it was lovely.”

“Jamila? What were you doing at Grandpa Jin’s Christmas party? You don’t even celebrate Christmas! That present was supposed to be for your birthday.”

“Well, he invited me, so I went. He gave me the present a bit early because he didn’t want me to feel left out, since everyone else was opening theirs. And you didn’t answer my question, where did you go and why is it more important than being here during your favorite holiday?”

Sonny found the turn he needed to take and started heading west. “Grandpa gave me some more clues. I think I’ve found where the next location is, and I’m on my way there.”

“Sonny, this is madness, it’s the middle of the night! At least, it is where I am, I’m not sure what time it is for you –”

“I have to do this, Jamila. Don’t try to stop me.”

“I understand that you’re disappointed after what happened in Iceland. But these artifacts have been around for hundreds of years, you can’t possibly control what’s happened to them for all that time.”

“It’s not… I wasn’t thinking about Iceland.”

“Then what are you thinking about?”

“I… I don’t think I can do this one alone.”

“You’re getting a team together again? I’d advise against it, especially after what happened in New Zealand.”

“No, it’s not a team, I was just thinking of someone like…”

“Like Nancy, you mean?”

He didn’t answer.

“I’ll take that as a yes. Well, I’d be perfectly happy to give her a call for you, we traded numbers ages ago, and I trust that she’s a responsible adult that can stop things from going _completely_ mad over there – ”

Sonny’s hand gripped the steering wheel and he concentrated on keeping the truck centered in the lane. “ _Please_ don’t call her, I don’t think she’d even want to waste time on something like this, and I don’t even know for sure if I’m at the right place.”

“Well, alright then. But I’m texting you her number so you can call her when you’re ready.”

“Thanks, Jamila.”

“Are you scared to call her? Is that it? Sonny, I’m sure she’d be happy to help. She’s helped us twice now, and once without even asking. Yes, she’s very skeptical, but she can’t deny that you _found_ something there, in New Zealand. Of course, she’s probably also a little displeased with the whole ‘almost getting killed’ thing, but – ”

There was a small beep and Jamila’s voice cut off. Sonny looked at the phone: _Call dropped._ Of course it dropped, he was in the middle of desert. There was no reception out here.

He drove the rest of the way in silence. It was another 45 minutes until he reached where he was going. Or at least where he was pretty sure he was going. As he got closer to the spot he’d marked on the map, he slowed down and started scanning the surrounding desert for any kind of landmark.

Nothing. Even after 10 minutes of searching, there was nothing out there but dirt and weeds. The flat desert floor stretched on for _miles._ He’d hoped there would be a rock outcropping maybe, or a cactus, he’d even take a sign along the highway at this point, but the more he looked, the more he found more _nothing._

He turned onto the shoulder of the road and parked. Of course there was nothing. He went out into the middle of a deserted… well, desert, at 2 am when he could barely see anything even _with_ his headlights, and expected to find… what? A place with less dirt? There was nothing out here. And even if there was something out here, there’s no guaranteeing it wasn’t already taken centuries ago. And even if it wasn’t, it’s not like he’d find it.

He took the spare blanket he always kept behind the passenger seat, threw it in the truck bed, and climbed in after it. He bundled himself up in the blanket and laid down to look at the stars. It was freezing out, but he liked it better that way – it helped him focus.

On a clear night like this, being so far away from the city meant no light pollution, and a much better view of the stars. Looking at the night sky always helped him when he was thinking over a problem. There were so many stars, and their pattern was so complicated… They couldn’t be organized or controlled, and the most you could do was let them lead your eyes through lines and curves and spirals until you lost yourself in them, and gave up trying to understand, and learned to just accept them as they were.

Sitting up, he reached for the compass in his pocket and placed it on the side of the truck bed. It shone its lights upward to join their brethren in the sky. Nancy would understand the stars. Well, maybe she wouldn’t, but she would at least try. And maybe, when they had all the clues, and they’d solved all the other mysteries… She just might solve them too.

He flopped back down on the truck bed in disgust. Sure she would help – after she was done believing he was a raving lunatic. He’d almost gotten her and everyone she cared about _killed_ with his stunt in New Zealand. How could he possibly ask her for help? Nancy would look at the stars and think that everything important about them had already been figured out a long time ago. To her they were probably nothing more than boring, predictable balls of gas that were much too far away to be worth caring about. The only thing she’d probably find comforting about them was adding them to the list of things she already understood.

A pair of lights passing by caught his attention, and he sat up, only to realize it was just a car driving by on the highway. He quickly put the compass back in his pocket. He probably shouldn’t be leaving priceless artifacts around where anyone could see them, especially the glowing ones. Jamila had warned him about that.

As more time passed, the more the cold made it harder to think rather than easier, so Sonny reluctantly started to climb out of the truck bed, only for the compass to fall out of his pocket, hitting the dirt with a soft thump and throwing a cascade of lights onto the ground as it rolled to a stop. As he reached down to pick it up, he noticed that one of the nearby rocks didn’t stop glowing, even when the lights from the compass weren’t pointing at it. He shoved the compass back into his pocket and ran to look at the rock. It was about a foot high and two feet in diameter, and someone had covered it with glow in the dark stars – the same kind he had on the walls of his bedroom when he was a kid. He didn’t need to reach into his pocket to know that the pattern of stars was exactly the same as the ones that shone from the compass.

The rock wasn’t so heavy that it was impossible to lift, but it took him both hands and a lot of huffing and puffing before he finally managed to turn it over. In the middle of the rock there was a hollowed-out crevice that was a few inches wide, and wedged inside was a leather-bound notebook. This had to be what Grandpa Jin had left for him to find. He pulled it out and opened it. The moonlight was barely enough to see by, let alone read by, but flipping through it he could make out some drawings of maps of the surrounding area and a lot of pages of gibberish – a code. He could probably decode it himself, but understanding all of the clues that were _in_ the code and connecting them with the locations marked on the maps… that was a detective’s job.

His heart was pounding as he closed the journal and walked back to the truck. Starting the vehicle and turning on the heat solved one of his problems, but the other one wasn’t so simple. He pulled out his phone and saw that he had a text from Jamila: _1-523-555-4399._ A couple bars flashed in and out at the top right corner of the screen. There still wasn’t any good reception out here, but by the time it would take him to drive back to town he would already have lost his nerve. If he was going to do this, he had to do it now.

He dialed the number. His finger hovered over the call button. This feeling he had, right now… It was the same feeling he had in that cave in New Zealand, when Nancy solved the puzzle on the compass, and it shined its lights for the first time – when they’d looked at each other at that moment, he knew she was feeling the same thing. They’d struggled, and they’d fought to put all the clues together, to make sense of everything, and at the end of that long road was… _Something._ They didn’t know what kind of Something, or what that Something meant, but by instinct they both seemed to understand that it was important, and that it would lead to something big.

He pressed call.

It rang… and rang… then went to voicemail.

_“Hi, you’ve reached Nancy Drew, amateur sleuth extraordinaire! Leave a clue and I’ll track you down later!”_

What was he supposed to say? He wasn’t prepared for this. Explaining this all to her over the phone was one thing, but condensing it down into a voicemail…?

“Hey Nancy, it’s Sonny. I just wanted to…”

Wanted to what? Ask her to fly all the way from wherever she was to New Mexico to look at some gibberish and a map? The artifact from Iceland had already disappeared a century before he got there. What proof did he have that whatever his grandpa wanted him to find in Roswell was still there, or even existed in the first place?

“I just wanted to say… Merry Christmas.”

He hung up, threw his phone and the journal onto the passenger seat, and started driving. He wasn’t sure where he was going to go, but it had to be away from here.


End file.
